Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino (1905–73) is known to many for his furniture designs. Although none of Mollino's designs were mass-produced, they command high prices among collectors of twentieth-century furniture and are part of the collections of major design museums. Others recall Mollino for his large secret stash of erotic Polaroids, taken throughout the 1960s and recovered among his personal effects after his death. The risqué photos have been the subject of several exhibitions and have inspired fashion designers, including Jeremy Scott, who drew on them when creating a recent collection for Moschino. Much less attention has been devoted to Mollino's contribution to architecture. With Carlo Mollino : Architect and Storyteller, Napoleone Ferrari and Michelangelo Sabatino offer the first carefully researched and comprehensive study of Mollino's architectural work. Drawing on rich archival materials, as well as Mollino's own writings, they argue persuasively that, while Mollino realized relatively few projects, his contributions to architecture—and, in particular, the modernist movement—are both significant and distinctive due to Mollino's strong affinity with surrealism. The book features both built and unrealized projects, including masterpieces like the Teatro Regio and the Torino Chamber of Commerce and early, lesser-known works like the Torino Horse Riding Club and the Lago Negro chairlift station in the Italian Alps. Lavish illustrations and essays by Ferrari and Sabatino round out this overdue tribute to an extraordinary personality of twentieth-century architecture.

Carlo Mollino - Architect and Storyteller

Original and inventive, the work of Carlo Mollino (1905-73) is a unique chapter in the history of twentieth-century Italian design and architecture. For the first time, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino presents his complete works in furniture and interior design. Most of Mollino's furniture was site specific with one-off pieces created for specially commissioned interiors. Rarely available, these works are highly sought after by collectors and design enthusiasts alike. The 1948 table featured on the jacket and on page 143 recently created a new world auction record for a piece of twentieth-century furniture when it sold for almost $4 million, double the previous record. From the start, both Mollino's interests and personality set him apart from his contemporaries. Influenced by the Second Futurist and Surrealist avant-gardes, Mollino was a modern-day Renaissance man active in an impressive number of fields, such as aeronautics, automobile design, art, photography, set design, town planning, furniture, interior decoration and architecture. Through his extensive artistic research, he was able to combine various contrasting forms of expression, which gave his work a remarkable and unusual dynamic. Mollino's furniture was based on organic shapes, such as tree branches, animal horns and the human body, with the female profile especially promirent in his designs. Beyond this highly personal aesthetic, his workinvolved research into materials and technology, and the development of complex construction techniques, as with the celebrated bent plywood 'Arabesque' table of 1950. Illustrated with original drawings, sketches and archival photographs, The Furniture of Carlo Mollino represents the most comprehensive record of Mollino's design production. Realized in collaboration with the Museo Casa Mollino and written by the museum's curators, Napoleone and Fulvio Ferrari, this monograph offers an exceptional insight into Mollino's groundbreaking oeuvre.

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